Flavored beverages are widely used by consumers and are often prepared using liquid concentrated drink mixes, including commercially-available products like TANG®, CRYSTAL LIGHT®, and KOOL-AID®, to provide beverages in a variety of flavors, including fruit and tea flavors. The ingredients of beverage concentrates often contain oils as flavoring agents and are often in a form of an emulsion where the flavor molecules are suspended within an aqueous medium. Most of the emulsions used in the beverage industry are oil-in-water emulsions, although there may be advantages to using other emulsion types for some applications. Flavored beverages may also be prepared from frozen, fruit-flavored concentrates, such as those traditionally sold in canisters. Such frozen concentrates typically include a large amount of water and are generally diluted at a ratio of 1 part concentrate to 3 parts water to provide the fruit flavored beverage. These types of products are often susceptible to spoilage and require storage at freezer temperatures to provide the desired shelf life.
A drinkable beverage from a beverage concentrate may be prepared using a two-step process, where a beverage concentrate including emulsified oil is prepared first, and is then diluted in water to create a drinkable beverage. Beverage emulsions are considered thermodynamically unstable systems that tend to break down over time due to a variety of physicochemical mechanisms, including gravitational separation, flocculation, coalescence and Ostwald ripening. Beverage emulsions may include weighting agents incorporated into the oil phase to slow gravitational separation of the oil droplets. A number of different weighting agents are known for utilization within commercial beverage products. Such weighting agents include brominated vegetable oil (BVO), sucrose acetate isobutyrate (SAIB), glycerol ester of Wood Rosin (GEWR and also referred to as ester gum), and dammar gum. Drawbacks of weighting agents such as SAIB, BVO, and GEWR include legal limits imposed on the amount of such weighting agents that can be added to the emulsions, and the fact that such weighting agents may be perceived by the consumers as not “natural” and thus undesired.